(Ann edited shorter version of this piece has been published in Middle East Eye)
Over the past few years, I have worked in the humanitarian and developmental sector as the lead analyst in a team of external consultants advising European donor governments on their crisis response in conflict zones. In November, I handed in my resignation notice due to the continued refusal by the European Union to call for a ceasefire in the face of a scale of violence that hundreds of scholars have warned can reach genocide. I cannot work with a donor’s crisis response in one country while they enable a crisis in another.
Rarely in modern history have explicitly-declared war crimes been given backing by supposed democracies. In the past few weeks, leading Western governments appear to have insisted on supporting a process of bloodletting by the state of Israel in response to the Hamas attack despite the intention to commit war crimes and collective punishment being explicitly and repeatedly declared both in advance and throughout the operation. This has included Israeli defence officials declaring that Gaza would be turned into a “city of tents, with no buildings” and that the emphasis of the offensive would be “damage, not accuracy”, Israel’s Defence Minister announcing the cutting off of water and power to the Gaza Strip at the start of Israel’s ongoing operation after stating that they are fighting “human animals”, one Israeli minister calling for Israel to “blow up and flatten everything”,, and that “Gaza should be erased… Revengeful and vicious IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] is needed here”. Another threatened to use the nuclear weapon
In any other context, such statements would be assessed as the type of rhetoric that has typically accompanied historical episodes of genocide. Since then, Israel has matched the rhetoric by breaking various records. More children killed than all conflicts since 2019. The most UN workers killed in any conflict. The most journalists killed than in any conflict on record. More civilians killed in one month than in a year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As many tonnes of bombs as those dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is necessary to deprive leading Western governments who continue to refuse to call for a ceasefire of any pretense of deniability that they did not know what was happening, a pretense that they may in future seek to retrospectively claim once the dust settles, the “moment” for supporting Israel passes, and the scale of the massacre “sinks in”. Half-hearted mentions today of “the need to abide by international law”, while simultaneously proclaiming the “right of Israel to defend itself” and enabling the ongoing military operation in Gaza, will not suffice for future attempts to reinvent history. Already, a shattering investigation citing the testimonies of Israeli intelligence figures on IDF combat practices and operational guidelines has extensively shown Israeli targeting of civilians to be calculated, premeditated, and intentional.
When that moment arrives, a disingenuous, disbelievable, and almost frivolous attempt by Western powers to claim that Israel is being trustworthy in taking “precautions”, or even denying the scale of civilians killed, is a shame that will be remembered and cited in history — as will be the complicity of a compliant media that allowed such a line to go untrammeled. Like Madeleine Alrbright’s “I believe the price [of half a million dead children from sanctions on Iraq] is worth it”, it will be recalled again and again by future generations. It is a return to pure, unadulterated, and unapologetic imperialism — after a period where the likes of Obama attempted to reinvent it in a more politically correct guise.
For the claim is as nonsensical as can be. It in fact is more defensive of Israel than Israeli officials themselves, who have explicitly taken to denying any responsibility for the Gazan population (saying the safety not their business but the “government of Gaza” — ostensibly the only time they seek to recognise Hamas as a government), claimed responsibility for the bombing of hospitals and declared their intention to displace the population to places like Sinai where they can live in “tent cities”.
It is this blatantly unconcealable and unsustainable dynamic — of leading Western powers attempting to provide a cover of deniability for an ally that is increasingly disinterested in keeping up pretenses — which has prompted leading Western governments to resort instead to attempting to repress speech and expression, criminalise protest, and ultimately intimidate opponents into silence. In various Western countries, those who have spoken out across various sectors have lost their jobs. All this has been reminiscent of the “if you are not with us, you are with the terrorists” paradigm promoted two decades ago by the Bush Administration, adopted today by many ostensibly “liberal” governments.
Is the sheer scale of the civilian death toll, unprecedented in any previous war with Gaza, also a “coincidence”? The result of an unconnected and mysterious rise of “tragic mistakes”? Let it be made crystal clear and said explicitly: Israel is not just targeting Hamas in this war, with high “collateral damage” of civilians on the side. It is intentionally punishing the Gazan population and seeks to get rid of this “sore” once and for all — and this is clear from both its actions and its officials’ statements. Just like it did in 2019, when it killed hundreds of protesters on the March of Return — to add to the thousands of civilians and children it has killed, hospitals and schools it has bombed, and illegal weapons it has used in a decade of wars before.
To pretend that Israel does not view the Palestinian population through adversarial lens, and that the same occupation power that has made the daily lives of the Palestinian inhabitants of the Hamas-free West Bank miserable for decades is somehow moved by liberality towards those in Gaza, is a childish fiction that belies basic understanding of this conflict, and indeed, any similar one. It is not one that should be taken seriously in any conflict analysis, whether of present or past. It is not even one that is being pretended by the likes of Israel’s president. Yet it is the theme we constantly have to endure in unserious questioning of Israeli officials on various Western media platforms.
For its part, the European Union is often believed to show greater consistency in condemning human rights violators than the likes of the US and UK governments. Events since October 7th have unfortunately revealed few substantive differences. While it eventually reversed its decision under pressure, the EU’s initial decision to suspend funding to Palestine after the Hamas attack — as clear an example of collective punishment as can be — set the tone. The heads of the EU Commission and Parliament would later travel to offer solidarity to an Israeli president who at the time was declaring: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible… It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being… involved”. Furthermore, the EU has also taken to repeatedly reaffirming “Israel’s right to self-defence” and condemned the use of “human shields” — without condemning Israel’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians.
Beyond Israel
Working on the context of the Middle East, as I have during the past few years, clear commonalities can be seen in the nature of violence deployed by the “Arab Winter” regimes, and that deployed by Israel in Gaza — as well as the enabling by international powers of both under the guise of “fighting terrorism”.
In various Arab Winter contexts, but perhaps most so in Syria, a ”Distancing to Protect” (D2P) model — in which Western powers led by the United States concealed a continued tacit support to Arab Winter regimes through adopting a policy of public dissociation — proved highly effective in concealing an extensive record of complicity in another possible genocide. It is necessary to make these comparisons to demonstrate just how deeply entrenched the opposition to regional democratisation is amongst Western powers such as the United States. The struggle for Palestinian freedom is part of this wider struggle, and those who oppose it also oppose the freedom of the other populations in the region. The commitment by leading Western powers, led by the United States, to Israel is part-and-parcel of a deep-seated, wider opposition to regional liberation — due to the threat to external interests that regional democratisation can bring, as noted by the scholar Eva Bellin. Far from “singling out” Israel, it is particularly useful to compare the context of Syria, where another plausible case for genocide took place. Despite being rivals on the surface, in both Syria and Israel, entire neighbourhoods were decimated by both in an indiscriminate scorched earth policy. And in both cases, the response by leading Western powers was one of deep complicity, in both similar and differing ways, as will be shown below.
Here, only one decade after the people of the region saw the invention of WMDs to justify an externally-imposed “regime change” in Iraq, the US Government went the opposite direction and falsely proclaimed that it had disposed of its WMDs precisely to avoid “regime change” (crucially this time however, when the demand arose internally and took place at the same time as an extensive US-Syrian normalisation process was taking place). When evidence of continued WMD use in Syria subsequently emerged, this was not only obfuscated and potentially concealed by the Obama Administration — but unknown to most, US-led military support was even quietly provided to the Syrian regime to enable it to capture areas where chemical weapons had shortly before been used.
Meanwhile, showing that narratives citing the use of “human shields” are not only deployed to defend Israel, during the Siege of Aleppo in 2016, former US Secretary of State John Kerry declared “there’s a Russian impatience and a regime impatience with the terrorists who are behaving like terrorists and laying siege to places on their side…” (known to few, US-led airstrikes even targeted opposition-held areas in Aleppo city during the regime offensive). Kerry additionally took to publicly providing the regime with license to launch airstrikes against certain designated “terrorist” groups, and called on the Syrian opposition to join forces with Assad against ISIS. Continuing into the Trump Administration, Pentagon officials publicly supported the genocidal regime undertaking military campaigns against ISIS. Throughout, Western powers including the US and UK were reported to have themselves shared intelligence with it (as well as meeting officials). Meanwhile, the main US ground allies in the war against ISIS, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Iraqi military and Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), both supported the regime in key campaigns (indeed, the SDF continues today to share control of certain territories with it, meaning that regime soldiers are deployed in areas that are covered under a US protective umbrella — while PMF fighters still serving in Syria continue to receive salaries from the US-backed central government in Baghdad, as well as having a separate line of Iranian funding).
Ultimately, US policy enabled the Syrian Government to deploy its airforce internally for possibly longer than any other actor in the history of civil war — continuing to share the same airspace even today (blocking the sort of anti-aircraft defence systems provided to more worthy Ukranians, while themselves joining the same airspace in 2014 and to this day). Ironically, these realities eventually led to the regime itself mocking the disparity between the loud public posture and the quiet ground collaboration with Western powers. Today, a new set of records is being broken with US-led complicity in Gaza.
So too In Iraq, where the anti-ISIS campaign saw the US-led Coalition ally with pro-Iran militias who under US aircover committed sectarian cleansing, again under the guise of fighting ISIS — with pro-Iran groups even receiving praise from US officials despite their abominable conduct during the campaign, which included emptying villages from their inhabitants, razing their homes to the ground, and partaking in extreme brutality and torture against their opponents.
In other words, the punitive approach of collective punishment is a consistent facet of the War on Terror. It is no surprise, therefore, that Israel’s actions in Gaza today are receiving support from the states that themselves operate within the same paradigm.
That the US-led policy descended to such levels shows just how deep the complicity in regional authoritarianism — and possible genocide — is. This D2P model concealed the quiet return to the support of brutal dictatorships following a 2011 promise that “mistakes from the past” had been learned. It also served as a policy model of quiet complicity that is not Israel-specific, and clearly varies from the unabashed type of support proffered from Israel. Yet Israel’s long-established practices — from its disappearing of thousands including children within its prisons without recourse to trial, its labeling of all opponents (including human right groups) as terrorists, its enforcement of demographic change, and its indiscriminate targeting of civilians — clearly resembles the tactics used by other regimes in the region. The statement that “Israel is the only democracy in the region” attempts to try and sever any attempt to make this obvious connection: Israel is clearly part of the same regional authoritarian order.
Ultimately, no matter the tactical model through which complicity in regional authoritarianism has taken place, in all cases, the end result has been the same. Whether the unconcealed antagonism of the Bush days, the serial gaslighting of the Arab Spring democrats of the Obama ones, or the unconditional support for a serial international law violator in Israel, the people of the region have have experienced the full gamut of tactics in the creative arsenals of the other side of this longstanding toxic relationship, and been the beneficiaries of all forms of hostility, complicity, duplicity and deceit.
Against undeclared wars
All in, this extensive record of adversarialism, with all of its tactical variations, is in truth resemblant of a posture of undeclared war. Unfortunately however, just like the amnesia towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that predated October the 7th, much of the Western world tends to forget that many of their leading governments have been in such a posture towards our societies for quite a long time. Within this paradigm, the inconsistent designation of the term “terrorism” plays a crucial role — namely, by concealing these long-term undeclared wars by powerful states through connoting acts of violence by insurgents as “surprises”, and thus falling outside the laws of war. By contrast, the use of violence by the state cannot be a surprise, as it is presumed to possess the “monopoly of violence”.
Yet the use of violence against civilians for political purposes is what constitutes the definition of terrorism, but the term is never used for states — including even deplorable and “pariah” regimes — despite being the most frequent fulfillers of that criteria. And it is precisely the lack of formal declarations of war which has served as a modus operandi for the likes of the United States for so long, as Syrians, Yemenis, and Iraqis will attest. It is also the ability of a powerful state to act with impunity — so long as it is dressed up in the right colours — and be safe from retribution that helps explain why Western powers have fallen into line behind Israel’s “right to self-defence” Israel does not represent only itself in this paradigm.
Undeclared wars are immoral, whether they are carried out by state or non-state actors. Meanwhile, situations of injustice, tyranny, and occupation create causes of resistance that embed within them aims which go beyond the removal of a dictator or the liberation of land from the occupier, aims which include the construction of replacement moral and ethical frameworks — because it is the absence of these values that have caused such suffering, and they acquire such a level of meaning incomprehensible to those who are so well accustomed to them. This is what supporters of liberation movements have to push for, but they have to do so within extremely trying circumstances. For when the avenues for the fulfillment of basic rights are closed off, and justice appears to be a naive hope — the butt of a joke in which the victim is made to feel naked and worthless, nothing is more likely to replace the desire for justice with a desire for retribution. Brutalisation engenders brutality, and indeed, it is precisely the intention of beastly tyrants to create “beasts” out of their victims. To prevent the targeting of innocents, the duty of human rights advocates must be to address both the symptoms — the ethics of resistance and insurgency — and the root causes — occupation and authoritarianism; not focus on one exclusively at the expense of the other.
The instrumentalisation of Israel by Western powers is for their own benefit, not that of the Jewish people
In a reversion to the “if you are not with us, you are with the terrorists” paradigm promoted two decades ago by George W Bush, Western Governments, media, and institutions have taken to accuse all of those who seek to place the events of October the 7th in their context — contextualisation — as engaging in providing “justifications”. Leading Western governments and media platforms to restart the timeline of the conflict with the October 7th attack by Hamas. Yet the conflict does not begin with the selective tuning in of Western audiences. This framing neglects the historical record of three major wars with Gaza in which the same indiscriminate targeting of civilians and war crimes have been repeated in every campaign, including the bombing of hospitals, schools, and the use of prohibited weaponry — as reported by reputable groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. During these wars, more than 6,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed. According to Israeli rights group B’tselem, of these were more than 1,000 children. The narrative also neglects the hundreds of Palestinians who were killed by Israeli forces during the peaceful “Great March of Return” of 2019, in which Hamas did not launch a military campaign. This is to add to decades of occupation, siege, and the apartheid regime that Israel enforces on the Palestinian people — as documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Israeli rights group B’tselem.
Such contexts are irrelevant, of course, only insofar as they implicate not only the State of Israel for complicity in the trajectory that led to the killing of its citizens on October the 7th, but also its Western allies. By refusing to put any serious pressure on Israel to come to a settlement with the Palestinians, at their weakest historical moment, leading Western governments helped firmly shut all other avenues. To make it worse, US administrations — both conservative and liberal — added insult to injury and chose by pursuing a series of normalisation deals with authoritarian regimes at the Palestinians’ — and indeed, in the aftermath of the Arab Winter, the Arab World’s — weakest moment, to make crystal clear to the Palestinians that they were alone.
Such an act, taking place on the wreckage of entire countries and popular spirits, was an act of no mean cynicism. It took advantage of the deterrence value that brutal crackdowns in Arab Spring countries communicated to Arab populations in others (indeed, it is no surprise that Western-allied regimes such as the UAE — an archetypal pariah one that has acted perhaps more than any to undermine attempted democratic transitions in the region, in the process conducting war crimes in a range of countries from Libya, to Syria, to Yemen, to Sudan — chose to normalise relations simultaneously with the likes of Israel and the Syrian regime; notwithstanding its abysmal abusive record, it was praised by leading Western states in the former case for doing so). But this approach was not only cynical; in conjunction with continued support for a regime of endless occupation and apartheid with no proposed end-date, it was also reckless and dangerous all-round — to Arabs and Jews alike.
As such, this posture by Western powers has little to do with the interest of the Jewish people — even if that is what it proclaims. Indeed, if leading Western governments did have the Jewish people’s interest at heart, they would not have continued to enable a situation that made the tragic events that took place on October 7th a more likely scenario. Nor is this some benefit of hindsight. Far before October the 7th, for its seven decades of existence, Israel has never been at peace. Israel has never enjoyed total security. Jews there are more likely to have to run into bomb shelters than they are in most other countries they inhabit in the world. While it is true that hardliners in the Israeli Government have in the past decade openly shut the door on both a two-state and one-state solution, many a conflict which have eventually been brought to an end through negotiations have also had their hardliners. It is not therefore the hardliners, who Western powers often hide behind, who are the primary factors in the equation. Rather, it is the position of sponsors on whether to continue sustaining them or not that determines the question of peace.
Leading Western governments may proclaim outrage at an accusation that they may be in any way responsible for the trajectory that led to the deaths of Israeli civilians at the end of the guns of October 7th gunmen. But within political science, the connection between indiscriminate occupations and indiscriminate insurgencies is not a controversial or novel one. This has long been accepted by conflict analysts, including those in the CIA. Indeed, in the not too distant past, the United States attributed the rise of ISIS in part as a consequence of the repression of the Assad regime, and other Western officials also admitted a link with the Iraq war.
Rejecting guiltwashing
We must also resist attempts to frame the conflict in a manner suitable for Eurocentric consciences. This current posture is a shameful abdication of the historical responsibility of leading European states — prime amongst them Germany and the United Kingdom — towards both the Jewish and Palestinian people. It is Western colonial and imperial powers who decided to implant a territorial conflict onto a faraway region as a “solution” to their refusal to open their doors to Jewish refugees, including during the Holocaust. It is they who created a war between victims, and manufactured a second victim community out of the first. These states owe reparations not just to the Jewish people, but also to the Palestinians. We cannot allow Western “guiltwashing” to take place through the bloodletting of Palestinians.
Here, we should be clear that “guiltwashing” does not mean simply acting out of guilt; rather, it is a model that intentionally seeks to conceal the pursuit of Western strategic interests under the guise of prioritising a historical responsibility to the Jewish people. As Joe Biden has repeatedly declared: “If there weren’t an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” As such, those who attribute Western posture on the conflict to an all-powerful Israeli lobby are mistaken. Nor was US-led support proffered for just “any type” of Israel, but for a specifically aggressive variant, which immediately ensured the manifestation of a long-term conflict by refusing to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in 1949, as demanded by UN Resolution 194.
In other words, the policy of Western powers on the conflict not only stems from a sense of historical responsibility towards the Jewish people, but continues to be influenced by a strategic decision originating with Cold War-era Western powers, led by the United States, to instrumentalise Israel as a “strategic outpost” which could serve as an allied “disruptor” within a geopolitical and civilisational space that was considered to be a historical, and if uncontrolled, future competitor.
And that it has, and both Arabs and Jews are victims of it. While the problems of the region cannot be solely laid at the foot of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the effects of a century-long conflict left over from the colonial era should not be underplayed. The historical US-led decision to support an aggressive model of the Israeli state at the expense of other alternatives was then, and remains today, an intentional choice. It is a choice which has stunted the wider region’s development, and contributed to keeping its societies under a state of long-term militarisation and authoritarianism, allowing regimes — both “moderate” and populist — to keep their societies in a state of permanent deprivation by pointing to the threat of Israel. It is a conflict that has served as a disciplinary vestige of colonial domination within the popular psyches of the region, and as a festering wound that has prevented the organic normalisation and natural progression of the region’s politics and governance. Perhaps worst of all, it created a deep fracture between Arab and Jew of a scale that never existed throughout the history of shared living between the two communities.
This state of affairs must come to an end, and there can be no return to “normality” after today. For it is “normality” that has brought us here, and it is the dishonest support of a regional “normalisation” process that clearly excluded — and was meant to exclude — one of the two main actors in the conflict, the Palestinian people, that has pushed the region to the precipice.
The need for consistency
Supporters of Israel often accused its critics of “singling out” Israel. Let us be clear that Israel is not a unique evil. There are other regimes in the region that attempt to whitewash themselves by proclaiming “resistance” to Israel, which are themselves abominable. Nonetheless, the Israeli occupation continues to be the longest ongoing foreign occupation in the world, and Israel is the subject of the largest number of condemnations by UN resolutions. The “singling out” is that which has been adopted, for decades, by leading Western governments and institutions — by promoting an Israeli-specific “opt-out” to international law. In any other context, Israel’s continuous, decades-long violations of international law would term it an archetypal pariah state.
European governments and institutions are not unique, nor should they be, in claiming to have an exception from recognising these basic realities that have been reported independently for years by international bodies and reputable human rights groups, both Western and Israeli. This is a self-centred approach that ironically claims a “European uniqueness” — albeit in a superficially contrarian “reverse” manner. It tells victims of the trajectory of events put in place by the Nazi era, both Jews and Palestinians, that they in fact know better. It, in fact, elevates Europeans above all others, including Jewish critics of Israeli conduct. To discredit these Jewish voices as being not quintessentially Jewish is ironic considering the accusation of anti-semitism often leveled at critics of Israel.
The ongoing exceptionalisation of Israel when it comes to human rights violations has long been rejected by various Jewish groups. Indeed, as many prominent Jewish writers — including members of the Zionist movement — have written both historically and today, unconditional Western support for a state of military occupation and apartheid is not only unjust to the Palestinian people, but also constitutes a corrosive factor on the political and ethical body politic of the Jewish state they proclaim to seek to protect.
For its part, the authoritarian regional order is also premised on the existence of competing authoritarianisms, both historically and today. Israel attempts to avoid recognition of Palestinian grievances by pointing to the backing by Iran of groups such as Hamas, as it historically did by pointing to the sponsorship of Palestinian groups by Saddam’s Iraq, Gaddaffi’s Libya, or Nasser’s Egypt. Iran for its part has required the existence of Israel to justify its expansive interventions in the region, even while its proxies take no significant role in the fighting against it today. Even more “moderate” regimes which have normalised ties with Israel often internally allude to the threat of Israel to justify keeping their societies in a state of permanent deprivation.
Moreover, Western support for Israel is often viewed by regional populations as part and parcel of their support for their own authoritarian regimes. This commitment was so deep that Western powers such as the United States preferred to collaborate with authoritarian, geopolitical rivals over those who professed the desire for democracy. Not only was this evident in Syria, but so too in Iraq and Lebanon, where governments with shared Western and Iranian sponsorship have respectively engaged in mass killing of protesters and in forcible deportations of refugees to danger zones. Analyses that focus on geopolitical fetishism — including both supporters and critics of Western intervention — constantly conceal this complicity, by adopting “good vs bad” powers binaries. It is important to connect these aggressive postures together and not understand Western support for Israel in isolation. In arenas of mutual interest, geopolitical rivals are able to come to deals with one another. By contrast, repressed populations cannot come to a deal with such powers.
For our part, we reject the attempts and pretenses by our region’s deformed regimes to continue to violate the rights of their citizenry by pointing at Israel, just as we reject Israel’s historical and ongoing violation of the Palestinians’ right to freedom, security, and liberty. Unfortunately, in both of these tasks we face not only the resistance of those regimes, but that of their international backers who stack up the odds by quietly helping to sustain them.
Today, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that if made to choose between sanctioning Israel until it grants the Palestinians their legitimate rights, or allowing Israel to wipe the Palestinians off the face of its map, that it is the latter option that Western powers can more easily make their peace with. Whatever Israel does, no matter how well-documented it’s human rights abuses, no matter how many UN resolutions it violates, no matter how consistent those who point them out are regarding other violators — it appears it will never be sanctioned.
Taking action
Stopping my work on a crisis response in a region that is dear to me was not taken lightly. I do not speak only for myself when I say that in effect, those of us especially from the region who work in such positions are presented with a choice: accept the decimation of one part of your community in one country, in order for support to be provided to another part of your community in another. The choice of how to respond to this choice can be difficult, especially in areas where the taking of action can potentially result in interruptions to programming that benefits vulnerable demographics. Yet while I fully believe that it can also take strength and courage to swallow misgivings that workers have with donors in the interest of the greater good, I also believe that there are certain moments in history where events reach a certain threshold. If this is not the moment for such action to be taken by those who can afford it, then there is no moment for it. In such a historical moment, the NGO sector cannot be paralysed by timidity and fear of donor punishment.
For its part, so long as the EU fails to develop its own independent foreign policy and extricate itself from that of the US, so long will it continue to relegate its own interests to the latter — as seen in it bearing the consequences of the refugee waves brought by the US invasion of Iraq, the US opposition to the overthrow of Assad, and the shambolic manner of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. EU donor crisis responses in places like Syria and Palestine are at best band-aids that are not framed within any coherent overarching political strategy that seek to change existing realities, and in lieu of this, end up by-and-large normalising de facto realities. Amongst other factors, this is also because the EU does not have the autonomy to set its own strategy. Meanwhile, at home the EU is alienating the populations within its wider geographical neighbourhood, raising inter-communal tensions within its own societies, and leading to the rise of populist nationalists that threaten the integrity of the EU as a political project. As part of this process, we are seeing a move towards authoritarianism and securitisation to deal with the inevitable challenges that are rooted in the contradictions between the EU’s human rights posture and its actual policies — a move that flies against Europe’s proclaimed historical tradition of liberalism.
On a personal level, it has become difficult to avoid the conclusion that attempts at institutional engagement have not reached the end of their road. The slow and incremental advances brought by two decades of engagement from the dark days of the early War on Terror appear to have been wiped out in the flash of an eye. For Western powers to be able to return to a post-9/11 posture with such ease, and with such little institutional resistance, appears to send a very clear, flashing message to Arab and Muslim communities: Not Welcome. Now, these communities are being asked to kneel. We cannot allow such a return to collective punishment, primarily of the Palestinians facing extermination in Gaza, and secondarily, of Arab and Muslim communities in the diaspora. Today, I believe there can be no more squaring of the circle, and it can no longer be business as usual.
For those who work in organisations that have partnerships with Western governmental institutions, it can no longer be business as usual. To my colleagues across this sector I say: it is true that we live in tough economic times. Yet the scale of the task is unprecedented: governments that are supporting explicitly-declared war crimes, and which are dead-set on “riding out the storm” to resist all calls for a ceasefire for as long as possible. We cannot allow such a return to collective punishment, primarily of the Palestinians facing extermination in Gaza, and secondarily, of Arab and Muslim communities in the diaspora. For there to be any chance of a change in policy, any chance at all, we must exert the maximum tools of pressure available to us. We must all bind together in this effort, to suspend our cooperation with these institutions until a call for a ceasefire is made. There is strength in numbers, and it is time to stand up and be counted. You are not alone.
The Eternal Spring 